Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Republican candidates for California governor blast each other to claim they aretougher than the other on “illegal” immigration.

While the state legislature and the governor have taken over $17 billion from school funding, national test data (NAEP) place California students near the bottom of the states on math and reading scores.Thousands of teachers and police are layed off,

For 2010, the Republican Governor proposes further draconian cuts in Cal Works, IHSS, Medi Cal and Children’s nutrition among others- each of which hurts the poor in our state. State budget cuts make the crisis worse. They create more unemployment.

With all this going on, the Republican candidates for governor are lambasting each other on the air waves for not being tough enough on illegal aliens.

What caused the economic crisis?

The nation including California is suffering a severe recession. Forty-Two state budgets are in crisis. Twenty Six million are unemployed and under employed. This crisis was created by finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street ,ie. Chase Banks, Bank of America, AIG, and others. Finance capital produced a $ 2 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of our unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008. Fifteen million people are out of work. You and I, and college students did not create this crisis.

Meanwhile, the main candidates of the Republican party thing that the problem lies elsewhere.As the Sacramento Bee editorialized,

From an editorial in the Sacramento Bee. April 6, 2010.

“So will Republican gubernatorial candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman step up and admit they're misleading California's voters about college students who are also illegal immigrants?

Both have been bashing the students as a financial burden on taxpayers to prove their tough-on-illegal immigration bona fides to the party faithful. They both want to repeal Assembly Bill 540, which grants in-state tuition to some non-residents, including some illegal immigrants.

But as The Bee's Susan Ferriss reported last week, those students represent a tiny fraction – 1 percent or less – of all students in all three of the state's higher education systems. On University of California campuses, for instance, there were fewer than 2,000 students who were not state residents but were paying in-state tuition in 2007-08 – and UC says only as many as 400 were illegal immigrants.

So the savings from rescinding AB 540 would be far less than the candidates suggest, a minuscule portion of the higher education budget.”

We would have to conclude that these candidates are truth challenged- and this is only the primary campaign.